Cambridge Essays on Education eBook

What we must try to do is to educate the faculties
of curiosity, interest, imagination and sympathy;
we must begin from the boy himself, and conduct him
away from himself. What we really ought to aim
at is to give him the sense that he is surrounded by
strange and beautiful mysteries of nature, of which
he can himself observe certain phenomena; that human
history, as well as the great world about him, is
crowded with interesting and animating figures who
have laboured, toiled, loved, acted, suffered, sinned,
have felt the impulse both of base and selfish desires,
but no less of beautiful, exalted, and inspiring hopes.
We want to convince the young that it is not well
to be narrow, close-fisted, insolent, suspicious, petty,
self-satisfied. Imaginative sympathy, that is
to be the end of all our efforts. If we aim only
at producing sympathy, we may get a vague sentimentalism
which is just distressed by apparent suffering, and
anxious to relieve it momentarily, without reflecting
whether it is not the outcome of perfectly curable
faults of system and habit. If we aim only at
imagination, then we get a barren artistic pleasure
in dramatic situations and romantic effects.
What we ought to aim at is the sympathy which pities
and feels for others, as well as admires and imitates
them; and this must be reinforced by the imagination
which can concern itself with the causes of what otherwise
are but vague emotions. We want to make boys
on the one hand detest tyranny and high-handedness
and bigotry and ruthless exercise of power, and on
the other hand mistrust stupidity and ignorance and
baseness and selfishness and suspiciousness.
The study of high literature is valuable not as a
mere exercise in erudition and linguistic nicety and
critical taste, but because the great books mirror
best the highest hopes and visions of human nature.
The precise extent of the intellectual range matters
very little, compared with the perceptiveness and
emotion by which the realisation of other lives, other
needs, other activities, other problems are accompanied.

I must not be supposed, in saying this, to be leaving
out of sight the virile exercise of logical and rational
faculties; but that is another side of education;
and the grave deficiency which I detect in the old
theory was that practically all the powers and devices
of education were devoted to what was called fortifying
the mind and making it into a perfect instrument,
while there were left out of sight the motives which
were to guide the use of that instrument, and the boy
was led to suppose that he was to fortify his mind
solely for his own advantage. This individualist
theory must somehow be modified. The aim of the
process I have described is not simply to indicate
to the boy the amount of selfish pleasure which he
can obtain from literary masterpieces; it is rather
to show the boy that he is not alone and isolated,
in a world where it is advisable for him to take and
keep all that he can; but that he is one of a great